(My other story "Deception and Defense in the Darkness" is a what-if fiction story that's a possible security nightmare I think about now and could worry about in a year or two. What follows did happen, and I sometimes lose sleep if there's any doubt about my backups.)
Many, many years ago, I was young and had an old enterprise-class laptop with a floppy disk drive and a small hard drive I was using for writing projects. It was late at night and a storm was coming in. Then, lightning struck nearby, close enough to shake the house and fill the air with static electricity. The resulting electrical surge fried the old laptop and floppy disk inside it, and I lost all my data. I was very upset. Many weeks of writing had been lost. The lesson I should have personally learned was (with the tech available then) that saving often and backing up to a floppy and removing it or an external drive of any kind was a good idea.
Unfortunately, something similar happened again in a different way — 15 years later, a then-new work laptop I was working on at a restaurant froze up and reset into a blue screen loop that couldn't be fixed without replacing the main hard drive. I didn't lose as much time and work, but I recalled the incident from many years earlier and then resolved to avoid letting that kind of thing happening again. It took two lessons for me to learn, but learn I did.
Always backup (whether laptops, servers, or databases) carefully and redundantly, because you never know when a disaster might strike, whether lightning, a technical flaw, or yes, human error.
